The present invention relates generally to the field of data communications, and more specifically, to the field of display control and support for computers connected to the Internet.
It is well known that advertising is a source of revenue for many activities on the Internet. For example, many sites, or pages, on the World Wide Web (WWW) include advertisements which generate direct revenue for the site owners and, hopefully, revenue for the advertisers. Unfortunately, little information is typically available about the people who actually view the advertisements. In addition, since most people are often inundated with advertisements, their tendency to ignore all of them may be increased.
More importantly, it is common for advertisers to be unable to accurately gauge the effectiveness, and thus, worth, of advertisements on various web pages. Even if the number of visitors to particular web pages are tracked, it may not be known how many people are viewing the web pages in a way in which the advertisements are actually viewed. In one example, an advertisement may be located at the bottom of a web page such that few people take the time to page down before jumping to another web page. In still other examples, an advertisement may include an image which takes too long to download, increasing the chance that a viewer would simply move on to another location before the image is clear, presuming the viewer is using a browser with image viewing initialized in the first place.
There is, therefore, a need in the industry for a system which addresses these and other related, and unrelated, problems.